It’s James Wood who has the excitingly new fresh original unexpected take. He breakes the mold in the very first sentence.

In the last 10 years or so, the rise of American evangelicalism and the menace of Islamist fundamentalism, along with developments in physics and in theories of evolution and cosmogony, have encouraged a certain style of aggressive, often strident atheistic critique.

And everything that follows is equally challenging and paradigm-exploding.

I can’t be the only reader who finds himself in broad agreement with the conclusions of the New Atheists, while disliking some of the ways they reach them.

No, you certainly can’t. Couldn’t you have checked? Google is your friend.

Along with this curious parochialism about the varieties of religious belief comes a simplistic reading of how people actually hold those beliefs. Terry Eagleton and others have rightly argued that, for millions of people, religious “belief” is not a matter of just totting up stable, creedal propositions…

The New Atheism is locked into a similar kind of literalism. It parasitically lives off its enemy. Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a “personal God”, so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism. The God of the New Atheism and the God of religious fundamentalism turn out to be remarkably similar entities…Since militant atheism interprets religious faith, again on the evangelical or Islamist model, as blind – a blind leap of faith that hurls the believer into an infinite idiocy – so no understanding or even interest can be extended to why or how people believe the religious narratives they follow…

So let’s talk about literature instead. Ok, but why start with theNewAtheism?

23 Responses to “Never heard that before”

Who is this ‘James Wood’? And why is he everywhere all of a sudden? He doesn’t even write very well (this is, of course, separate from the lack of insight).

Wittgenstein was obviously right, though this appeal to practice over proposition can also become a rather lazy way, for people like the Catholic Eagleton, of defending orthodox beliefs via the back door – as if a bishop encouraged his flock by saying, in effect: “It doesn’t matter what you believe. Religion is not about propositions, but about practices. So stick at those practices: just keep on doing the church flowers and turning up every Sunday.”

There’s a subordinate clause in there that needs to be taken out the back and put out of its misery. And it should be ‘to defend’ not ‘of defending’.

It used to be a commonplace that lawyers were bad writers while literature graduates were good writers, but in the last few years it seems to have reversed. Several senior partners and heads of chambers/stables of my acquaintance tell me that English literature graduates these days write badly.

At the New Yorker, he’d have excellent subs to clean up his rotten prose, which may well confer an illusion of ability. The Guardian, as most people know, is sub-less; hence the endless jokes in Private Eye.

Hmm. I don’t think the New Yorker wants writers who depend on subs to clean up their work. Maybe he’s gotten lazy. (I’ve read very little of his highly-regarded reviewing, and none of it bowled me over, particularly – so I can’t give an oracular opinion on whether he’s deteriorated or not.)

so no understanding or even interest can be extended to why or how people believe the religious narratives they follow…

I wonder if the author has even read ‘Breaking the Spell’ a book by a ‘New Atheist’ dedicated to this very question. What I suspect the author is put out by is that (speaking only for myself), while I’m interested in the psychological and sociological drivers of religious belief, I’m really not all that interested in the theology. I might be interested in why and how people believe the religious narratives they follow, but insofar as those narratives make unsupported truth claims about the world, I can’t pretend to take them seriously. It all sometimes seems like a weird experiment in literary theory in which one takes a novel and immerses oneself more deeply in the text by pretending that the events described *really happened*.

I don’t think that religion provides much in the way of original, meaningful or useful insight into what the Alpha Course probably call ‘the big questions’: why are we here? what do we know? what can we say about what we do not know?

Since Eagleton does not even argue — he blathers, digresses, distorts, distracts, insults, and asserts, but never actually argues — let alone rightly argue, this phrase alone is sufficient evidence to permanently add James Wood to my ts;wr list. (In the tradition of “too long; didn’t read,” I hereby instantiate and encourage others to use this abbreviation for writers who deserve the designation “too stupid; won’t read.”)

Once again, some idiot sits down to bash The God Delusion, when in fact his real target is The Selfish Gene, in which Dawkins committed the unspeakable crime–he won the argument. Dawkins has to be most caricatured public intellectual in the world. You can barely see him anymore in a field of strawmen. It would be nice if people like Wood would actually address what Dawkins really says, but that would require effort.

“Feagletosh” has been disseminated a good deal here (and I think elsewhere), skep. I forget who coined it – was it someone here? Or someone elsewhere? Anyone remember? The other half, for those who don’t know, is Stanley Fish.

I was reading some Orwell the other day, and I came across an essay entitled Through a Glass, Rosily. While he was speaking about leftist Be-Quieters of his day, his argument can be equally applied to the arguments of the atheist Be-Quieters:

The whole argument that one mustn’t speak plainly because it ‘plays into the hands of’ this or that sinister influence is dishonest, in the sense that people only use it when it suits them. … Beneath this argument there always lies the intention to do propaganda for some single sectional interest, and to browbeat critics into silence by telling them that they are ‘objectively’ reactionary. It is a tempting manoeuvre … but it is dishonest.

…

So often it seems a positive duty to suppress or colour the facts! And yet genuine progress can only happen through increasing enlightenment, which means the continuous destruction of myths.

It is interesting, the way in which Orwell points out that the be-nice or be-quiet approach inevitably declines into a fascist suppression of the truth.

Personally, I prefer Bunglefish, a composite of Madeleine Bunting, Terry Eagleton, and Stanley Fish. All seem to spew the same vague nonsense (and within two paragraphs of talking about nuanced versions of God, immediately go back to direct observations of the white bearded man in the sky.) But any parody on Eagleton will do. He not only created a strawman of Dawkins and Hitchens, he actually named it Ditchkins, as if to make certain that no one could forget that he was talking about a fictional character.

Bunglefish is a great name, but Bunting doesn’t really go in the box with Fish & Eagle. They do a special kind of academic lit crit nonsense, and they’re both stars in that particular “field”; they both confuse lit crit with philosophy and themselves with philosophers. They both have that dopy lit crit “celeb” thing going. They have the same kind of immovable conceit. They have so much in common…

He’s a very highly-regarded (I’m increasingly wondering why) literary reviewer mostly for the New Yorker; he’s also written a novel.

He is also a literary critic, and according to Wikipedia,

In reviewing one of his works Adam Begley of the Financial Times wrote that Wood “is the best literary critic of his generation”. In an interview with Clive James, Martin Amis described Wood as “a marvellous critic, one of the few remaining.

However, as I scanned Woods article to see which works of modern fiction provide “[a] more nuanced examination of religious belief,” I came across this (tortured) sentence:

But one of the novel’s [To The Lighthouse] central questions turns on what it means to continue to need or make use of a religious language whose content is no longer believed in.

Wow! Where did Wood get that impression?

To the Lighthouse is about Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent feelings about her mother and her father. She wrote To the Lighthouse to deal with these feelings and to put them to rest. I’m sure that Woolf’s many biographers would support my interpretation of the novel.

For all the people in the comment thread who would like to move on from uninformed Wood-bashing to actually reading one of the man’s books, How Fiction Works would be a good starter. It’s a short book, it’ll take you one night. I don’t know if I share Wood’s opinions on the New Atheists, and I really don’t like the Terry Eagleton reference there, whom I think is a fraud, but James Wood is a clever guy, full of untimely meditations about literature. In the past, Butterflies and Wheels has posted many critical insights on Derrida and other postmodern quacks. Well, Wood is on your side.